Digital/Online Marketing Communications Strategy

This week I received an email from TD Ameritrade about its newly enhanced website. A banner in the message proclaims that the site now has “faster navigation, smarter search, and more intuitive menus.” Audio for a short embedded video talks about “a landing page the truly feels like home” plus “redesigned navigation with easy to use menu.”

TD’s note has nice graphics to illustrate new site tools and features. But what really caught my attention — as someone who works in web communications — is that the message includes user experience (UX) lingo, such as landing page, intuitive menus, keyword phrases, and how a user can easily toggle between accounts.

The language of user experience

You don’t have to be a user experience professional to know that if you can’t figure out how the heck to find your way around a web site then that’s a bad experience. But does this mean the language of UX is commonly understood by the general public?

TD’s note suggests this is so, and there are more prominent examples, such as the missives on the government’s Health Insurance Blog following the rollout of healthcare.gov that explicitly refer to “user experience.”

There’s a good argument to be made that using the language of UX in marketing copy is not always the most user friendly approach. Rather than say “easy to use menu” it may simpler to just go with “find what you’re looking for fast”.

What do you think? Has the terminology of user experience gone mainstream?